The article examines links involving Portuguese convents, noble families and the court, which emerge from the study of chronicles of these monastic houses written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such links include the presence of members of these families in the monasteries, demonstrations of political allegiances by the religious communities, as well as favours from the nobility to them, among other practices. Monastic chronicles are suitable sources to investigate the ways in which the communities positioned themselves as regards changes in the political sphere.
monastic memory; politics; seventeenth and eighteenth-century Portugal